Now counted among the prized treasures preserved in the British Library, the late 13th century so-named Salvin Hours ‘is one of the largest, most richly decorated independent Books of Hours for English use’, items which in themselves ‘are very rare at so early a date’. But, whilst elaborately illustrated, ‘it is characterized by a decorative scheme which insistently and grotesquely depicts Jews in violent, ugly stereotypes’.1 Which was then, of course, very much ‘on message’…
… the Jewish community in England being officially fair game at the time this work was produced. In 1290 King Edward I reached the natural conclusion of his increasingly punitive treatment of English Jews throughout his reign when he legislated for their expulsion from the country. However, by the time the book came into the possession of Gerard (or Jarrard) Salvin – ‘ye gift of my uncle, 1685′ – the Salvins of Croxdale Hall were themselves on the receiving end of royal edicts by dint of their own religion.
As Roman Catholics in the face of Elizabeth I’s muscular promotion of her father’s Reformation (and thus nominally on the ‘wrong’ side of various uprisings in the North over time), the Salvins crucially ‘were never zealots’, readily signalling as much when pressed.2 While it certainly did not go unpunished – ‘the number of times on which the Salvins were convicted and fined in the late 16th/early 17th century are legion’ – such low-key recusancy would in no small measure assist a continued association with Croxdale which now extends across more than 600 years.3
‘An excellent house, placed on a lofty situation, and commanding a most beautiful prospect of the vale through which the river Were winds its course; Sunderland-bridge is in front, and the enlivened prospect of the great southern road at the agreeable distance of half a mile. It is bordered by extensive plantations, and embellished with pleasure grounds in a good taste.’ (Hutchinson, 1794)
Today, the siting of the Grade I listed house, ‘hidden in a wooded park’4 above the Wear, may account for its relative obscurity, and benign neglect for the survival of many unmolested features, not least the eight-acre, three-walled garden, ‘considerably larger than any contemporary example yet found’.5 This garden’s form, and also that of Croxdale Hall as it stands today, are to no little extent the fruits of the two mid-18th century marriages…
… of one of the few Salvin squires not to be called Gerard. And it was marriage which had first carried the family name (originally ‘Sylvane’) to County Durham, having migrated from the famed forests of Nottinghamshire, via Yorkshire, over the preceding two centuries.
A younger son who married well, Gerard (1) ‘had livery of his wife [Agnes de Walton’s Croxdale] inheritance in 1402′. This property, three miles due south of the city of Durham, would subsequently pass in the Salvin male line until World War Two, the first ten squires sharing the same Christian name. Gerard (6) died in 1570, a year after the doomed Northern uprising of Catholics against Queen Elizabeth, of which his son was an active supporter. Gerard (7) would later be pardoned but not before he had publicly abased himself for pointedly interring his father without ceremony in protest at the outlawing of Roman Catholic burials.
‘He appears to have been a poor-spirited specimen of his race,’ averred a 19th century historian. ‘When charged with the affront, instead of having the business through he consented to recant in public. The words he was forced to utter were quite bad enough: “I indecently, unnaturally, and unneighbourly buried my father as though he had not died of God’s kind. I am heartily sorry for this .. desiring you all to take good example by my punishment.”6The steady succession of Gerards at Croxdale was very nearly derailed in 1644 when the eldest son of Gerard (9), fighting on the losing side in the Civil War, ‘was slain at Northallerton’. But Gerard would in fact outlive all his remaining offspring, engaging local craftsmen to extend Croxdale Hall before the succession of second son Bryan’s eldest, Gerard (10), in 1663.7 (Another son, Anthony, begat a cadet branch of the family whence later sprang prominent Victorian architect Anthony Salvin.)
Surviving papers of both Bryan and son Gerard indicate that significant alterations were made to the existing house – a three-sided courtyard affair open to the east – in their time, not least ‘the earliest reference in the county to sash windows’ (1704).7 Precisely what form these developments took has been obscured by later transformation of ‘this remarkably complex house’.8 And it is conceivable that the major remodeling of Croxdale Hall in the 1760s might have happened several decades earlier had an irresistible marriage proposition not turned out to be a distracting and rather expensive chimera.
*
‘As to removing a youth so soon from school, with the intent to marry him, the offer of so considerable a fortune was made to me (for the proposal sought me not I it) was not to be slighted.’ Being the somewhat self-justifying reflections of a chastened Bryan Salvin (who had succeeded his father Gerard (10) in 1723) in the aftermath of the mysterious wedding that never was.
From which quarter the scheme had emanated is unclear but it was plainly persuasive enough – ‘in days when a judicious marriage was the only way a Roman Catholic could increase his income’ – to prompt serious commitment to the mooted arrangement.9 Salvin acknowledged that taking the teenaged Gerard ‘out of college, to attend after a young lady, equipped accordingly, to follow her to Paris, and afterwards a young gentleman to be maintained in the world, a large expense would appear unavoidable’.10
Alas, this investment would come to naught, the grand plan unfortunately unraveling in Belgium. ‘How it was managed in Ghent .. they who were there know best,’ recorded Salvin in 1734, ‘but I neither sent them there, nor took any steps in this affair without the advice and approbation of most of my friends.’ Of his son’s foreshortened schooling, Salvin reconciled that ‘it was pretty well known’ that Gerard would have left soon anyway, being unsuited to ‘confinement and regulations’.10
But, like his education, Gerard’s life itself would be truncated, dying in 1737 before he came of age. Indeed, of Bryan Salvin’s five sons, three predeceased their father (four remaining unmarried) leaving third son William to succeed to Croxdale in March 1751. Still single at this point, William’s marital fortunes were to make good his father’s thwarted aspirations – but it would not be without a fight.
The estate William inherited was largely intact despite the second Jacobite rebellion six years earlier. For while many northern Catholics were actively sympathetic to the aims of ‘the ’45’, Bryan Salvin had been keen to emphasize his non-involvement, pledging “to give no disturbance whatsoever to His Majesty King George and his government, nor any assistance to his enemies”.2
And William’s coffers would be swelled in 1754 through his marriage to Mary, daughter of Sir Edward Gascoigne of Parlington Hall near Leeds. However, her death just two years later (aged 22, without child) might be regarded as a pivotal moment in the evolution of the Croxdale Hall estate. For with his second wife came not only another dowry (of around £6,000) but by rights, Salvin was convinced, a whole lot more where that came from.
Thus, soon after his 1758 remarriage to Catherine Thornton, of Netherwitton Hall in Northumberland, Salvin began not only the modernization of the old mansion but also embarked (↑) on a simultaneous decade-long pursuit of his new in-laws through the courts on behalf of his wife’s contested birthright. Catherine had been the only surviving child of Netherwitton’s squire John Thornton at the time of the latter’s death in 1742, whereupon Thornton’s brother James inherited. At his subsequent demise the Netherwitton estate was devised upon James’ two daughters, unreasonably so in the belief of the Salvins.
If he had indeed ‘dragged Margaret and Mary [Thornton] through the courts in an attempt to eject them from their father’s estate’, Salvin would be ultimately unsuccessful. However, despite some high-level reversals, his claim would be doggedly pursued until finally, in 1769, a settlement was reached, ‘the defendants agreeing to pay Salvin one third of the value of the [Netherwitton] estate’, to wit: £12,504.11
And all the while, broadly on the footprint of the existing U-shaped house…
… the remodeling of Croxdale Hall was afoot, its new ‘plain, polite facades’11 contrasting somewhat with a ‘rich mid-Georgian interior’9. Behind the west front (↑) ‘the finest room is the entrance hall and staircase, which rises and divides beneath tall windows and a virtuoso Rococo ceiling, possibly by Cortese.’13 Left of this space the library is dominated by a fine (slightly later) mahogany bookcase as long as the room itself. Beyond, a dining room occupies one of two bow bays which book-end the north wing, its ‘enriched Venetian window surmounted by carved wyverns’ (probably c.1766).8
William had inherited parkland established by his father, including a one-kilometre avenue arrowing east from the Hall (↓ defined by cruciform plantations) with High Croxdale Farm at its terminus. This building now gained ‘grander one-storey wings with large Gibbs surrounds’, embellishments which were contemporaneous with an ambitious, expansive garden developed to the south.11
Overseeing matters horticultural at Croxdale for the first two decades of William Salvin’s half-century stewardship was John Kennedy, a member of the renowned family of planstmen/gardeners. ‘Correspondence among the Salvin papers shows that [this appointment was] organized by his brother Lewis Kennedy’ who would supply multifarious varieties from his influential nursery in Hammersmith.14 But the precise involvement of the Kennedys in the shaping of the Croxdale walled garden remains an open question.
Manipulated watercourses created an elongated string of ponds (below) effectively forming the garden’s southern boundary, brick delineating the remainder of its broadly rectangular area (sheltering trees without). The long angular crinkle-crankle north wall incorporates a large Italianate orangery midpoint [see]. The latter structure has been altered over time but ‘the survival of [its] heated walls complete with their chimneys and flues intact is rare’.14 These structures clearly emphasise a desire to maximise the garden’s productivity but the space was equally ornamental.
‘One is wholly unprepared, when the door in the wall is opened, for the astonishing vista through it – a terrace walk quarter of a mile long.’8 Most of the cultivated detail of the garden would gradually be lost to lawn through the second half the 20th century but the 21st has seen renewed interest in the wake of ‘proposals to restore the parkland and gardens at Croxdale Hall’.5
William Salvin’s heir Gerard having died in his teens, second son William (2) duly succeeded in January 1800; his marriage six months later would associate the family name with a landmark house at the opposite end of the country. For, through his wife Anna Maria Webbe-Weston, their younger son Francis would in due course inherit Tudor Sutton Place (r), near Guildford in Surrey.
Sold out of the family in 1918, in the late 18th century a change of heart had averted Sutton from the ‘truly atrocious proposal to transmute the house in a bastard Italian style’, a scheme suggested by classical architect Joseph Bonomi.
Much closer to home and perhaps coincidentally, William Salvin’s younger brother Bryan was to call upon the services of Bonomi’s son (and fellow practitioner), Durham-based Ignatius, having acquired in the first decade of the 19th century the Burn Hall estate, opposite Croxdale on the other side of the Wear valley, where he rebuilt the house (left).
Plainly in favour with the Salvin family, the Catholic Ignatius Bonomi would also supply a flight of steps (←) to the entrance front of Croxdale Hall during this period. ‘It is conjectured that he may also have been responsible for the south front [with pediment, left] and presumably the remodeling of the rooms behind it.’8
But the most distinctive development in the time of William (2) was in the north wing (↓) where, behind its bowed eastern extremity, a new chapel was created. Tall gothic windows set into the east wall now illuminated this space in the stead of the now redundant Venetian arrangement to the north. An inscription within records that the chapel was ‘beautifully designed and executed’ by the squire in 1807; ‘the most elaborate Gothick decoration of any contemporary northern ecclesiastical building,’ in Nikolaus Pevsner’s stout estimation.11
Still dominating the altar is a ‘Lamentation painted by the Regency artist Maria Cosway for the old Chapel at Croxdale, popularised through this print‘ in the early years of the 19th century.
William’s son, Gerard (11), succeeded in 1842 but at his death in 1870 the family of his eldest surviving son Henry made a separate estate property their home, Croxdale Wood House now being enlarged for the purpose. Meanwhile, for most of what remained of the 19th century, the Hall itself was leased to industrialist John Rogerson whose Wearside Iron & Coal Company revived dormant mining activity on the (then 2,340a) estate at Croxdale Colliery from 1875.
In the wake of Rogerson’s death in 1894 and that of Henry Salvin three years later, a rental agreement of 1904 drawn up for young squire Gerard (12) shows Croxdale Hall subsequently being shared with several spinster sisters. (That same year, ‘the Misses Salvin’ would arrange for the sale the aforementioned medieval Book of Hours through Sotheby’s.) Gerard died childless in 1921, Croxdale now passing to his brother Lt-Col. Herman Salvin who, five years later, married the widow of his kinsman Marmaduke Salvin, late squire of Burn Hall just across the river. This union resulted in the sale of Burn Hall to St. Joseph’s Missionary Society, a Catholic seminary, in 1926.On September 2, 1939 Country Life magazine published the second, concluding part of its profile of the Hall and gardens at Croxdale; the following day the United Kingdom declared war on Germany. During the course of the conflict the greater part of Croxdale Hall was surrendered as an emergency hospital annexe, while Herman Salvin collapsed and died ‘suddenly’ in the grounds in 1943. The lack of a son or surviving brother now saw the Croxdale estate pass in the female line for the first time in more than 500 years, nephew Gerard Roberts formally adopting his mother’s maiden name in 1947.
Country Life had concurred with 19th-century Durham historian Robert Surtees’ assessment of Croxdale, where ‘without the least attempt at display, everything wears the quiet air of ancient possession’, an ambience which it would seem Gerard Salvin (13) was not overly-minded to disturb across his six-decade tenure as squire. He died in 2006 (his widow Rosemary during the gestation of this piece, ‘from Covid-19’); in recent times, Croxdale Hall has undergone internal reconfiguration ‘to ensure that the property meets the needs and lifestyle expectations’ of both the current generation (r) and the next.15
‘While no one would put Croxdale with the masterpieces of Georgian architecture, we can recognise that this quiet country house represents, better than many more grandiose buildings, the essential continuity of English domestic architecture, whatever may be the passing fashion or pressure of events.‘9
Grand estate with great history
Interesting to see for the first time the house where I was born over 73 years ago.
I was born here in February 1947, during the heavy snow falls. My father had to walk over the fields, (on top of the hedgerows) from West Cornforth. I was a week old before he got to see me. I have the receipt for £5,5shillings which my parents had to pay for our stay in the maternity hospital.
Hi Valerie I was also born here in 1950 I’ve often wondered why when my parents lived in Bill Quay on the banks of the Tyne in Gateshead could you have any idea please.
I was also born here on the 2nd of February 1950
I’ve often wondered why here when my parents lived in Bill Quay which is on the banks of the River Tyne on most the eastern edge of the Gateshead council boarder?